Thursday, November 12, 2015

C.G.McKay’s website ‘Intelligence Past’

Craig McKay,
author of ‘From
Information to Intrigue’, ‘Swedish
Signal Intelligence’ and contributor to journals such as Intelligence and
National Security, Journal of Intelligence History and Cryptologia has started
a new website dealing with intelligence history. He has already added several
essays on interesting cases plus he has uncovered the identity of the
mysterious Polish
agent 594.

If you’re
interested in intelligence history you should check out his site Intelligence Past.

1). How did
you become interested in WWII intelligence history and what was the process
that led to the publication of two books on the subject?

Part of the reason, I gave on my site,
namely growing up at a time when the two great wars of the twentieth century
were very much part of living memory. But why, you may still ask,
study intelligence, rather than say the history of weapon development,
another interesting and perhaps more important subject? I suppose the answer
lies somewhere in our psyche. A clue might be the following anecdote. As an
insufferable sixteen-year-old, I acquired the atrocious habit of writing down
various observations in aphoristic form. One of them was: “But surely, in some
sense, the perfect actor is still undiscovered.” Anybody who says something
like that, is more or less fated to become interested in the
world of secret intelligence! With regard to my books, these
merely reflected my own location in Sweden. I was there, I was interested in the history of intelligence and
discovered that apart from journalistic accounts, not much serious work had
been done. My interest in SIGINT, cyphers and such things, however, had
another origin. I had worked in the field of mathematical logic under
Professor R.L.Goodstein. At that time, logic and the foundations of
mathematics were peripheral subjects in the British mathematical curriculum. Computing was mainly still numerical
analysis. I recall giving a lecture on Turing machines about 1964 when
few professional mathematicians in Britain had heard of his work, far less
took an active interest in the subject. It sounds quite extraordinary now but
so it was. Of course, no one spoke about his war work. Turing was only one of
the mathematical logicians involved in wartime cypher work. There were others such as Turing 's pupil Robin Gandy,
Hasenjaeger in Germany, Quine and Rosser in the US.

2). Why did
you decide to start the ‘Intelligence Past’ website and what are your
goals for it?

My motivation was, I confess, entirely
egotistical: to get my various bits and pieces on the history of secret
intelligence out on the web rather than let them perish instantaneously with
me. What other people do with them is entirely up to them. It would be nice
when I am still around, if some braver souls were encouraged to post their own
pieces on the site. Let’s see what happens.

3). What
areas of intelligence history do you find most interesting and what are you
currently researching?

Because of my own history- virtually a
lifetime in Sweden to which I remain greatly attached, I have tended to
limit my own interests in two ways (i) geostrategically I focus on Northern
Europe and (ii) thematically I am also very interested in the interaction between neutrality
and intelligence. About the latter, I say a bit in the first few pages of
my book ‘From Information to Intrigue’. At the moment, I have been looking at old puzzles connected with Polish intelligence such
as Major Choynacki`s wartime agent network. The Poles are most
extraordinary people. Their troubled history, sandwiched between Germany and
Russia, has made them masters of the dark conspiratorial arts. There are
naturally many other things which I think about as diligent readers of my
site will discover.

4). Which
unsolved cases from WWII do you think researchers should try to investigate
further?

There is no shortage of questions, that’s
for sure! Here’s a few straight from the top of my head.

(1) Why were the Russian organs so
concerned with Raoul Wallenberg? Lots has been written (some by me) but
we are still in the dark.

(2) Why did the Soviet authorities
expel the Swedish Minister and his Military Attache during the war? Was it mere
tit-for-tat for Swedish action against Soviet espionage in Sweden? I
would be interested to know if it was partly due to certain statements
about these Swedish diplomats in Japanese diplomatic traffic that the Soviet
Union is known to have read. The Swedish Minister (Assarsson) was a
garrulous fellow who occasionally spoke to his Japanese colleague about the war
situation.

(3) How far was the Abwehr involved in
the Hess flight to Scotland? I have written a short paper on this but so far
without being able to interest anyone else to investigate further.

(4) The MAX network in the Balkans:
how one longs for a detailed Russian account of this case by a Russian
historian using their own archives. Were Kauders, Hatz and Enomoto all long
term Soviet assets? Did Nahum Eitington make a special journey for a
conspiratorial treff with Enomoto and Kauders in Greece in October 1940?

(5) How closely did German
intelligence follow the telegram traffic of the Jewish Agency during the war?

(6) Who was the spy NERO in
Spain/Portugal reporting on the UK and run by the Hungarians in the last year
of the war? His name crops up in Schellenberg and Höttl testimonies.

(7) Why is there not more about the
use made of COMINT in Economic Warfare during the war?

(8) What was the greatest triumph of Soviet
wartime SIGINT?A last comment: never forget that in any
significant spy case there will always be loose ends.Paradoxically that is both a limitation and an opportunity.